Update on Final Project - Dynamic Additions

I was able to get pretty far today with implementing the dynamic functionalities of my site.  

What this first entailed was fixing the gallery pages so that the thumbnail images actually showed up! After creating my thumbnails in Photoshop and putting the image locations in a database, I tried to pull data from the database just as we had learned in class. Nothing appeared on my page! I could not for the life of me figure out why.

Amos pointed out that in my gallery controller page I had the gallery view page before I got the paintings for the page. This means that the page loaded and the paintings were received after the load! I switched things around and the paintings showed up:

//get the paintings page - function in paintings_model

$paintings = getPaintings();

//print_r($paintings);

require_once("paintings_view.php");

I was able to use lightbox.js to create a dynamic and fancy-looking gallery - I grouped the paintings by series using a lightbox command. This means that when you view the main paintings page, which shows all of the series together, you can click on an image and have it pop up over the page, then scroll through only that series by hitting the next image in the pop-up window. Pretty fancy!

After that, I was having issues with my gallery left nav bar. When you go to the paintings page, selections for paintings series appear on the left nav, and by clicking a series, only those paintings were supposed to appear. This turned out to need an Ajax command with a PHP variable passed in to for the series name. Enabling this functionality was a lot more difficult than I expected!

Now I'm working on cleaning everything up, getting the photograph and show images in there, and creating a roll-over for the Artwork nav button that pops up a sub nav with Paintings, Photography, and Writings options.

I've decided to nix the Mailing List as no other artist webpage has this - for these kinds of pages I think the motto is the simpler the better.